On the weekend of March 24 – 25, Desert Island and The Drawing Center will present FUNHOUSE, a new, interactive book fair at which guests can make their own books in collaboration with resident cartoonists and illustration artists.

FUNHOUSE guests will interact with resident artists to create unique pages for one-of-a-kind books to be assembled at the fair. The resident artists will also have their own publications available for purchase at General Store within the FUNHOUSE fair, with games of chance, author signings, special activities, and giveaways of artists’ books. A SIDESHOW of talks, lectures, and presentations will be organized by FORGE. art magazine’s Matthew James-Wilson. Additional spectacles, like life-size interactive cut-outs and funhouse mirrors will provide wacky fun and photo-ops galore!

SIDESHOW Talk Series Saturday, March 24 and Sunday, March 25 at 11:30am, 1:30pm, and 3:30pm
Programing TBD. Sideshow will be programmed by Matthew James-Wilson of FORGE. art magazine

kuš! Magazine Comic Zine WorkshopsSaturday, March 24 and Sunday, March 25, 12:30–4:30pm
Tickets $40 via Eventbrite here.kuš! comic zine workshop, lead by artist Oskars Pavlovskis from Riga, Latvia, will be a collaborative comic drawing experience suited for participants of any age and skill level. The workshop will focus on the creation of short experimental comic stories based around the FUNHOUSE theme. Together the participants will take part in creating a unique self-published comic zine, which will be printed and assembled during the workshop and each participant will receive a copy.

The 206th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2018 at 7pm at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.

Joe McCulloch on Total Language: Steve Ditko at 90

Ask a person today who created Spider-Man, and they’ll probably tell you Marvel Comics, that inescapable entertainment brand. Some of them might say Stan Lee, the man whose profile is highest in mass media. Others, perhaps fewer, will know about Steve Ditko (b. 1927), a cartoonist of an unusual trajectory: his vision and craft gave concrete form to commercial characters still adored across the globe, half a century later, but his passion would soon pour into deeply personal, experimental, and furiously divisive works, comics emboldened by the freedoms of artist ownership, yet antagonistic toward the compromised values of society. Few agreed with the ideology espoused by these comics, but Ditko kept working, undeterred – through the rise and fall of the underground era, through the transition from newsstand racks to comic book stores, through the graphic novel boom and the advent of crowdfunding. He is still working now, here in New York City. Since 2007, Steve Ditko has published more than 800 pages of new comic book art, and they are among his most fascinating: comics where text and image work in a simultaneity of intent, a total language that invests the tautness of line and the hatching of shadow with thematic roles in the story, where the function of the black and white page is a statement of the artist’s worldview, by which there is only good and evil, and where the individual must ascertain the objective nature of the world, lest they reject their own lives. Come and see for yourself.

Joe McCulloch has been writing and speaking about comics for 14 years, sometimes to audiences other than his bathroom mirror.

“There are certain beings who bear the stamp of the divine seal and are preordained to receive the higest favours within the gift of glory; they are fated to pass through life like those brilliant meteors which are seen to flash across the heavens and disappear in the same instant. Bastien-Lepage was one of those meteors.”

Each month, we pluck a long forgotten volume from the shelves of the New York Society Library and resurrect it as a low budget variety show.

Mini-comics, even the “classic” ones, often disappear. Some of the most beautiful ones are never reprinted. Many artists choose not to have their earliest work collected, seeing the flaws ever so clearly, while the reader from the past holds the work close to the heart, aware of all the undeniable beautiful moments it also so obviously contains. Those private moments have shaped so many readers who went on to make mini-comics (or regular comics) of their own. The works disappear, remaining only in the hearts and minds of a happy few, but their essence (whether aesthetic, political, formal, etc.) live on as new shapes in new works of art.

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